Ministers said that if the proposed £14bn plant is built, communities would be entitled to a total package of £128m over 40 years through a combination of a tax payments and government grants.

Until 2030, the local authorities would benefit from an existing “business rates retention” scheme, allowing them to keep a share of the rates EDF would pay.

For the next 30 years, when the business rates retention scheme may no longer be running, central government will itself pay benefits to the local authorities each year. The Government said this was intended to ensure communities received similar benefits to those living near wind farms, who are allowed to keep 100pc of the business rates they pay.

The benefits are in addition to a £94m community package promised by EDF to local authorities as a sweetener to gain support for the project.

The project will only be built if EDF and the Government can agree on subsidies. Negotiations have dragged on for months without agreement on the price that EDF will be paid for the electricity the plant could generate.

Separately, ministers unveiled a raft of documents setting out more details of plans to encourage investors to build new wind farms and other green power plants, through contracts offering subsidies for 15 years. Green industry body RenewableUK said it was concerned that some of the documents suggested the Department of Energy and Climate Change was envisaging barely any new wind farms would be built in the 2020s.

They also appeared to show ministers were doubtful that offshore wind developers could reduce their costs to a target of £100 per megawatt hour by 2020. Maf Smith, RenewableUK’s deputy chief executive, said that the Government “risks undermining confidence by scaling back on its ambitions”.

He suggested that if investors doubted the Government’s commitment to wind power, they would not make the investment needed to drive down the costs of the technology and to develop a UK supply chain, creating jobs.

“The UK has a massive opportunity on offshore wind to get the jobs in as we are deploying the technology first and it would be tragic if we squandered that and let our European competitors take the spoils,” he said.